# Prehistoric Shelters and Early Thatch

> What archaeology reveals about the first roofed shelters and the origins of thatch, from Palaeolithic huts to Neolithic longhouses.

- URL: https://roof.wiki/prehistoric-shelters-and-early-thatch/
- Topic: History of Roofing
- Also known as: early roofs; prehistoric huts; prehistoric roofing; brush huts; early thatch; Palaeolithic shelters
- Regions: Global, Europe, Middle East, Africa, East Asia
- First published: 2026-11-01 · Last reviewed: 2026-11-01
- Cite as: "Prehistoric Shelters and Early Thatch." roof.wiki. https://roof.wiki/prehistoric-shelters-and-early-thatch/

## Key facts

- **Oldest known wooden structure:** Kalambo Falls, Zambia, about 476,000 years ago
- **Terra Amata shelters:** About 400,000 years old; up to 14.9 m (49 ft) long
- **Mammoth-bone dwellings:** Mezhyrich, Ukraine, c. 19,280–11,700 BC
- **Ohalo II brush huts:** About 23,000 years old; six oval huts
- **Britain's oldest known house:** Star Carr, by 8500 BC, 3.5 m (11.5 ft) across
- **Linear Pottery longhouses:** c. 5500–4500 BC; thatched, up to 45 m (148 ft) long
- **Earliest direct straw-thatch evidence in Europe:** Early medieval period
- **Tiles replace thatch on Greek temples:** c. 700–650 BC, Corinth

Long before fired tiles, slates or metal sheets, people roofed their shelters with whatever grew or roamed nearby: branches and brushwood, grasses, reeds, bark, hides, turf and even mammoth bones. Thatch, in the broad sense of a weatherproof covering made from bundled plant stems or leaves, is almost certainly the oldest of all roofing techniques, but because plant materials decay, the direct evidence for prehistoric roofs is usually indirect: postholes, hearths, floor deposits, collapsed debris and a handful of exceptionally preserved sites. This article traces what archaeology reveals about the first roofed shelters and the origins of thatching, from the Lower Palaeolithic to the farming villages of the Neolithic.

Other terms for these early forms include brush hut, windbreak, pit dwelling and roundhouse; thatch is *chaume* in French, *Reet* or *Stroh* in German, *paja* in Spanish and *kayabuki* in Japanese.

## The challenge of evidence

Organic roofing almost never survives. Most of what is known about early roofs is inferred from the ground plan of a structure, the size and spacing of post sockets, the slope and depth of floors and the remains of the materials that fell when a roof collapsed or burned. Even for thatch, which was the normal rural roof in many regions until modern times, direct archaeological traces are scarce. Wild plants such as water reed, bulrush, broom, heather and rushes were probably used to cover shelters in Late Palaeolithic Europe, and straw probably began to be used once people grew cereals in the Neolithic, yet no direct archaeological evidence of straw thatch in Europe survives from before the early medieval period.[12]

## The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic

### Kalambo Falls, Zambia

The oldest known wooden structure was excavated in 2019 at Kalambo Falls, beside the Kalambo River in Zambia.[1] Two logs had been deliberately shaped so that one sat in a notch cut into the other, and luminescence dating of the surrounding sand places them about 476,000 years ago, before the appearance of *Homo sapiens*.[1] The team, including Larry Barham of the University of Liverpool and Geoff Duller of Aberystwyth University, who led the dating, suggested the logs might have formed a platform or raised surface above wet ground.[1] Although it was not a roof, the find shows that early human ancestors could plan and join timber for construction hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously known; the previous record for a wooden structure was about 9,000 years.[1] The same deposits yielded five other worked wooden objects, dated to roughly 390,000 and 324,000 years ago, including a sharpened tip and pieces that may have served as digging sticks or wedges; waterlogged sediments explain their unusual preservation.[1]

### Terra Amata, France

At Terra Amata, in what is now Nice on the French Riviera, Henri de Lumley in 1966 discovered postholes and other evidence of several shelters about 400,000 years old.[2] Some were up to 14.9 m (49 ft) long.[2] The form of their superstructure has to be reconstructed from the pattern of posts and floors, a problem common to almost all early shelters.

## The Upper Palaeolithic

### Mammoth-bone dwellings

On the periglacial steppes of eastern Europe, where trees were scarce, people built shelters from the bones and tusks of mammoths. Four small dwellings of mammoth bone and tusk at Mezhyrich in Ukraine, dated between about 19,280 and 11,700 BC, are among the earliest possible domed structures known.[3] From the Neolithic onwards, builders in the ancient Near East also raised corbelled stone domes, an early alternative to plant roofs where stone was plentiful.[3]

### Ohalo II, Israel

The best-preserved Palaeolithic huts are at Ohalo II, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), which was exposed when the lake level fell drastically after years of low rainfall.[5] Six oval brush huts there date to about 23,000 years ago, at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum.[4] Excavations led by Dani Nadel of the University of Haifa found, in the largest hut, a 4.5 m (15 ft) long mat of bundled grass stems and leaves around a central hearth, preserved under a thin layer of pressed clay; it is regarded as the oldest known bedding.[5] The huts' occupants fished, hunted birds and animals and gathered wild wheat, oats and barley, and analysis of about 20,000 animal remains from one hut reveals a broad diet.[4] Ohalo II shows that by the late Ice Age, people were already gathering and bundling grasses, the basic skill behind thatching.

## The Mesolithic

### Star Carr, England

At Star Carr near Scarborough in North Yorkshire, beside a former lake, archaeologists from the universities of York and Manchester found a circular structure about 3.5 m (11.5 ft) across, dating from at least 8500 BC, when Britain was still joined to continental Europe.[6] Post holes surround a central hollow that may have held organic material such as reeds, and the site also preserves a platform of split and hewn timbers described as the earliest evidence of carpentry in Europe.[6] The building was hailed as Britain's oldest known house, at least 500 years older than the previous record holder at Howick in Northumberland.[6]

## The Neolithic: settled villages and new roofs

The adoption of farming encouraged permanent settlements, larger buildings and more durable roofs. Crops also supplied a new roofing material, straw, as a by-product of cereal cultivation.[12]

### Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, Anatolia

At Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Anatolia, communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic raised monumental enclosures with T-shaped limestone pillars up to 5.5 m (18 ft) tall between about 9600 and 8200 BC.[7] At Çatalhöyük, on the Konya plain, the eastern mound holds 18 levels of Neolithic occupation dated about 7400–6200 BC.[8] Its houses were packed back to back without streets, so the flat roofs formed the town's thoroughfares and people entered their homes from above.[8] The roof was therefore a working surface as much as a cover, a role flat roofs still play in many dry regions.

### Linear Pottery longhouses, central Europe

Europe's first farmers, the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) of about 5500–4500 BC, built long timber houses along the Danube, Elbe and Rhine.[9] The houses were 5.5–7 m (18–23 ft) wide and could reach 45 m (148 ft) in length, as at Bylany in the Czech Republic.[9] Three rows of posts supported a pitched, thatched roof, and the walls were wattle and daub, sometimes alternating with split logs, with clay dug from pits beside the house.[9] With no windows and a single doorway at one end, some longhouses stood for as long as 30 years, and villages typically comprised five to eight houses.[9] These are the earliest large buildings in Europe whose thatched roofs can be reasonably inferred from their structure.

### Skara Brae, Orkney

In Orkney, where timber was scarce, the Neolithic village of Skara Brae was built about 5,000 years ago from flat stone slabs set into mounds of midden and linked by covered passages.[10] Each house had a single room of about 40 m² (430 ft²) with built-in stone furniture, including a dresser, two box beds and a central hearth; life in the village appears to have ended around 2500 BC.[10] Skara Brae has been part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site since 1999.[10] Even here, in one of Europe's best-preserved prehistoric villages, the record describes walls, passages and furniture in detail but not the roof coverings.

### Jōmon Japan

In northern Japan, the Jōmon culture developed sedentary life from about 13,000 BC, sustained for roughly ten thousand years by fishing, shellfish gathering and nut harvesting.[11] Its settlements, now part of a World Heritage property of 17 sites in southern Hokkaido and northern Tōhoku, include pit dwellings and shell middens, represented today by life-size interpretive models while the original remains stay buried.[11]

### East Asia and the arrival of tile

In China, fired clay tiles appeared remarkably early, at Qiaocun on the Loess Plateau about 2400–2200 BC, marking one of the first steps away from purely plant-based roofs.[14] In Greece, fired tiles began to replace thatch on temples near Corinth around 700–650 BC, and within about fifty years the change had spread across the eastern Mediterranean and Italy.[13] Even so, thatch remained the everyday roof for most people for millennia after tiles were invented.

## Materials and techniques

Prehistoric builders used the plants and materials that their environment offered:[12]

- **Brushwood and branches**: laid over pole frames, as at Ohalo II and probably Terra Amata.[2][4]
- **Grasses and sedges**: bundled for bedding and, by extension, for roof coverings.[5][12]
- **Water reed, bulrush and rushes**: abundant at lake and river edges, where many early sites cluster.[6][12]
- **Heather and broom**: on uplands and heaths.[12]
- **Straw**: available once wheat, rye and other cereals were grown.[12]
- **Bone, hide and turf**: where trees were scarce, as on the Ice Age steppes.[3]
- **Palm leaves**: in the tropics, a tradition that continues in palm-thatched houses from East Africa to the Pacific and the Americas.[12]

The thatched, slanted roofs of the Linear Pottery longhouses, carried on three rows of posts over buildings up to 7 m (23 ft) wide, show that by the sixth millennium BC farmers could roof large spans with plant materials.[9] Supply mattered then as now: a modern estimate holds that an average house needs the reed from 4–5 acres (1.6–2 ha) of well-managed reed bed for its thatch.[12]

## Legacy

The prehistoric reliance on plant roofs had a long afterlife. In England, thatch remained the only roofing material for most of the rural population until the late 19th century, when the commercial distribution of Welsh slate from 1820 and the spread of canals and railways made other materials widely available.[12] Medieval thatch in southern England was mostly wheat, rye or maslin (a mixture of the two), while water reed was rarely used outside East Anglia.[12] More than 250 roofs in southern England still carry base coats of thatch over 500 years old, and the United Kingdom had an estimated 60,000 thatched properties in 2013, served by about 1,000 full-time thatchers.[12] Thatching traditions remain alive in Japan, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Scotland, and in palm and grass roofs across Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America, including the thatched houses of rural Yucatán.[12]

## Notable sites

- **Kalambo Falls**, Zambia (about 476,000 years ago): oldest known wooden structure.[1]
- **Terra Amata**, Nice, France (about 400,000 years ago): postholes of several shelters.[2]
- **Mezhyrich**, Ukraine (about 19,280–11,700 BC): mammoth-bone dwellings.[3]
- **Ohalo II**, Israel (about 23,000 years ago): six brush huts and the oldest known grass bedding.[4][5]
- **Star Carr**, England (by 8500 BC): Britain's oldest known house.[6]
- **Göbekli Tepe**, Turkey (about 9600–8200 BC): monumental Neolithic enclosures.[7]
- **Çatalhöyük**, Turkey (about 7400–6200 BC): roof-entry houses.[8]
- **Bylany**, Czech Republic (Linear Pottery, about 5500–4500 BC): 45 m longhouse.[9]
- **Skara Brae**, Orkney (about 3000–2500 BC): stone-built village.[10]

## Sources

1. Archaeologists uncover notched logs that may be the oldest known wooden structure — Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-notched-logs-that-may-be-the-oldest-known-wooden-structure-180982942/
2. Terra Amata Shelter — Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/terra-amata-shelter
3. Dome — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dome
4. 23,000 year-old submerged brush huts discovered in the Galilee reveal dietary secrets of prehistoric Israel — University of Haifa. https://pr.haifa.ac.il/2022/02/09/archaeology-23000-year-old-submerged-brush-huts-discovered-in-the-galilee-reveal-dietary-secrets-of-prehistoric-israel
5. Haifa University archeologist uncovers world's oldest bedding — Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haifa-university-archeologist-uncovers-world-rsquo-s-oldest-bedding
6. Stone Age remains are Britain's earliest house — University of York. https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2010/research/earliest-house/
7. Göbekli Tepe — UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572
8. Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük — UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1405
9. Linear Pottery culture — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Pottery_culture
10. Skara Brae: History — Historic Environment Scotland. https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/skara-brae/history/
11. Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan — UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1632
12. Thatching — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatching
13. Roof tiles — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_tiles
14. Researchers reconstruct the earliest known composite-tiled roofs — Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-reconstruct-earliest-composite-tiled-roofs.html
15. Ohalo II — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo_II
16. Mezhyrich — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezhyrich
17. Terra Amata (archaeological site) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Amata_(archaeological_site)